1. Technical Field
The following embodiments relate generally to a virtualized operating system and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for providing an operating system based on a lightweight hypervisor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Virtualization technology is technology in which multiple logical machines are created on a physical machine and the created logical machines run individually. Virtualization technology is essential technology in a cloud computing environment.
Virtualization technology comprises a host machine, a guest machine, and a hypervisor. Here, the host machine is a physical machine. The guest machine is a logical machine, i.e. a virtual machine. The hypervisor runs on the host machine and manages the guest machine.
The hypervisor controls the information about, and behavior of, the guest machine. Also, the hypervisor controls the virtual machine and the sharing of physical resources across multiple virtual machines.
A space that is isolated from a physical machine is allocated to a virtual machine. Accordingly, even if the virtual machine is infected with malware, the physical machine is not affected by the infection. This advantage enables virtualization technology to perform important functions in both commercial and open solutions for malware analysis.
Recently, as virtualization technology has been popularized, research for improving security by applying virtual technology to PCs is being conducted. Such research has resulted in the Qubes Operating System (OS), Virtics, and the like. Based on such research, virtualization technology is expected to improve the security of PCs.
However, conventional virtualization solutions, such as a Type I hypervisor and a Type II hypervisor, may impose overhead associated with the allocation of resources for running a virtual machine. Due to such overhead, it may be inefficient to apply such conventional virtualization solutions to PCs.
Meanwhile, conventional virtualization solutions require independent operating systems for each of the physical machine and a virtual machine. Also, in the conventional virtualization solutions, it is necessary to separately allocate some of the resources of the physical machine to the virtual machine in order to run the virtual machine.
Compared to server environments, PC environments have limited resources. Here, the resources may include processors, memory, and disks. In the case of conventional virtualization solutions, the above-mentioned requirements may further limit the resources available to PCs. Consequently, such a limitation of resources may degrade performance of the PCs.
Consequently, in order to successfully introduce a security solution based on virtualization technology into PCs, new technology capable of improving security and minimizing overhead and performance degradation attributable to virtualization is required.
With reference to security for operating systems, U.S. Pat. No. 8,578,483 and Korean Patent Application No. 10-2013-7025864 have been disclosed.